Today's challenges just as perilous as decades ago

Listening to President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address and anxiously studying the various confused and fragmented international news reports on recent events in Algeria and Mali, I couldn’t help thinking about another inaugural address many years ago that made a very big impression on me. I was young then and living in France, where my father was stationed with the U.S. Army. A war was under way then also — a war in Algeria to oust France’s colonial presence there, and we were obliged to follow a strict curfew because of the Algerian terror bombing campaign in France. This was my first real introduction to foreign affairs that would become the focus of my professional life — first in the Army and later in diplomatic service.

On that chilly January day in 1961, after taking the oath of office, President John F. Kennedy said, “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world (emphasis added).

Text Size

-

+

reset

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

“This much we pledge — and more.”

Much has happened in America, both at home and abroad, since that speech a half century ago. The torch has been passed to new generations that have seen that commitment tested repeatedly. The Cold War struggles, some of them quite hot indeed I later discovered, are behind us now, but we continue to face today new foes and new challenges every bit as dangerous and implacable in their destructive aims as those we faced then — every bit as threatening to our way of life.

Do we as a nation still have the resolve to provide the leadership to face down these new foes and meet these new challenges as we did 50 years ago, or have our commitments to those goals been progressively emptied of conviction? Have our defeats or less than clear success on foreign battlefields and our increasingly bitter partisan squabbles at home over diametrically opposed views of our national identity and purpose finally sapped us of our sense of the nation’s character, its destiny and its responsibility to both itself and the world we live in? What has become of our vision of ourselves and our place in the world? Can we still see ourselves as “the last best hope,” and do we still care?